ExchangeDefender Grows Again

First of all, thank you for your tremendous support of ExchangeDefender 5 and to all of our partners that make it possible for us to keep on building ExchangeDefender and growing it into a significant part of business. We’re growing again – and with growth comes responsibility to do it in a way that is reliable and improves availability – so we’re announcing a new IP address range that ExchangeDefender will soon start delivering mail from:

Introducing ExchangeDefender – LA3:

206.125.40.0/24 (or: 206.125.40.0/255.255.255.0)

If you are currently using IP restrictions (highly recommended) please add the range above to your IP restriction list which should include at least 65.99.255.0/24 and 64.182.140.0/24. You can download the Exchange 2003 and 2007 IP Restriction Guide here. The process takes less than a minute so please take care of it as soon as possible, by March 29th, 2010 at the latest.

For your convenience, here is a guide on how to add this new range to Exchange 2003 and 2007. If you’re enforcing restrictions on your firewall then it will depend on the manufacturer but should be pretty straight forward.

Exchange 2003

1. Open Exchange System Manager

2. Expand Servers, servername, Protocols, SMTP

3. Go to properties on Default SMTP Virtual Server

4. Go to the Access Tab and then click connections

5. Click Add on the IP restrictions and select Group of computers. The subnet address is 206.125.40.0/24

Confirm that you still have at least 65.99.255.0/255.255.255.0 and 64.182.140.0/255.255.255.0 present. Do not remove any IP ranges.

Exchange 2007

1. Open Exchange Management Console

2. Expand Server Configuration and select Hub Transport

3. On Exchange 2007 select Default servername receive connector and go to properties

a. On SBS, the connector may be called SBS servername Internet

4. Navigate to the Network tab and click add on Receive Mail from remote servers that have this IP address and set the IP as 206.125.40.0/24

Confirm that you still have at least 65.99.255.0/255.255.255.0 and 64.182.140.0/255.255.255.0 present. Do not remove any IP ranges.

Support

If you have any questions or concerns please open a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com. We’ll begin notifying clients via phone, email and postal mail (US only) starting 3/17/2010.

OWN Sync for ConnectWise

At last years ConnectWise Summit we released what is arguably the most sophisticated integration of cloud services in ConnectWise – not only do we post statistics into ConnectWise but we use the web services API (integrator login) to integrate our support directly into ConnectWise without using the ConnectWise network or a ConnectWise CAL. This makes OWN cloud services beyond comparison with anything else in the MSP industry because we are a software company that actually supports it’s products – for free!

Ever since that release we’ve been hounded by partners to provide the missing piece of the cloud in the integration: billing.

The beauty of cloud solutions is that clients can manage themselves – MSPs can be more profitable because they don’t have to waste expensive engineer hours to do mundane tasks like password resets and account additions/deletions/changes. Users can self-service themselves and the MSPs are there to provide an SLA and high end support.

Cloud certainly paints a pretty picture – until the last day of the month when some unfortunate accountant or MSP owner has to spend a few hours sitting around, clicking through companies and agreements and updating the billing counts by hand. We counted – it takes 8 clicks to update an agreement from the main CW screen. Per company. Per agreement. We can do better than that 🙂

Meet OWN Sync for ConnectWise – the one click agreement sync framework that takes all of OWN services and updates them in seconds. The first time you run it you will be prompted to set service default prices that you charge your clients. This will save you a ton of time on data entry:

The second screen will allow you to adjust those prices – so if you charge different rates for different companies you can do so here:

Just match the companies with the services, review your prices, click finish and you’re done. All seat counts are simultaneously sync’ed and you’ve just turned that “invoice day” into a half day Friday.

We’ll start rolling the software out to our ExchangeDefender Service Providers on Monday. You can download the brochure here. Please note that this is only available to our service providers, and while it does update all of our services across the board, it is only available to the partners that resell the $150/$200 MSP package.

So you asked what we’re going to do for our MSPs to make it worth not going one mailbox at a time – this is the first step! For the next step you’re really going to want to check out our newsletter today about ExchangeDefender 6 details.

ExchangeDefender Snow Storm Special Webcast

Many of our partners across North America are snowed in and need some entertainment: Join Vlad Mazek, CEO of Own Web Now and chief architect behind ExchangeDefender for a demo and live walkthrough of all the new features in ExchangeDefender. It starts in an hour:

http://bit.ly/a4SkTN

Brief registration is required, as is a sense of humor. It’s a live, unscripted demo! Starts at 2 PM EST today, February 11th.

ExchangeDefender Encryption & Compliance Archiving

Last week we introduced ExchangeDefender Encryption and ExchangeDefender Compliance Archive. Both features are free for ExchangeDefender clients and built into the product. Thanks to your overwhelming feedback, both are also capable of being enabled or disabled per domain so that you can create multiple levels of ExchangeDefender for your client base.

Please take a moment to watch a ExchangeDefender Encryption & Compliance Archiving launch video.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp!

I know it’s a cliché, but help us help you! We’re soliciting commentary about the following video:

Preliminary Training Video: Encryption Video

The idea behind this documentation video is to provide our MSP & Enterprise partners with the video you can place on your own web sites and showcase your own image. When you view the video please note that we will be recording individual videos for our partners with the first and last slide completely branded for you. We’ll also be providing the script and the PowerPoint so you can record your own modifications or voiceovers.

The big idea is that ExchangeDefender 5 is your product and as you build a revenue stream on message security, compliance and encryption it helps to project your own image and your own brand.

Vlad: We’ve heard it over and over again about the pain our partners go through when they onboard the clients and have to train them. We understand why you don’t place training videos on your web site, but we want to meet you half way – we’ll produce videos branded for you and our marketing team will help integrate ExchangeDefender and eventually all of OWN into your brand.

So please, send feedback to vlad.xd5@ownwebnow.com and let us know if we’ve missed anything. Audience is the IT administrator or end user and it’s produced primarily for our partners. We will have different training videos for our partners and our partners staff.

With these features, our ExchangeDefender migration and launch is complete. Please keep on pouring in the feedback, as most of you know, we’ve adapted ExchangeDefender as we’ve rolled it out and it is one of the things we intend to sustain. We’re listening and you can scroll through this blog for evidence that we’re taking your feedback and putting it to work QUICKLY.. This new ExchangeDefender has been out for less than 2 months and it’s by far the most popular thing we’ve ever done so for that.. Thank you!

ExchangeDefender Re-re-releases & Previews

Earlier today we had a fairly embarrassing circumstance that came out as a result of our weekend migration. You can read about it here in detail, suffice to say the messages were not releasing from the SPAM quarantines due to a change in the reserved words in SQL. What I’m getting at is that as a developer you have to have a sense of humor about what you do when undocumented, unknown issues get past the test suites and make you look like a fool.

But as the demotivator says: Perhaps your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. Today was one of those days and even though we isolated the issue very quickly, we still looked like fools and the team was determined not to have this issue come up again. We sat down and developed a solution to the issue of message releases.

Web Re-Release Feature

Scenario in the long long ago (yesterday): When a message is released it is taken out of the quarantine view because it makes no sense to keep on displaying the quarantined messages once they have been released.

New! (as of 4 PM): When you access the quarantine view you will now see another icon toggling the display of released messages. By default, once you release the message, it will not be displayed in the listing. But if you click on the released message button, we will show you all the messages you released recently. We will still have full preview of the message available and the ability to trigger a release again!

It may seem trivial, but it’s quite valuable: MSPs spend a lot of time trying to assist users with SPAM releases that get eaten by antivirus, antispam, IMF or anything else in between – and since we got to taste that frustration in our own failure today, you can kiss that problem goodbye.

Email Digest Preview

Once upon a time (this morning): If you attempted to release an email or trust a sender directly from the email SPAM Report you would only get the message vitals – from, to, subject and date.

New! (as of about noon): Now when you release a message from a SPAM report you get a full message preview. No more wondering what that message contained if it didn’t get there immediately or guessing if you just whitelisted a forged SPAM – you’ll know immediately! With full HTML rendering and images.

I apologize for the inconvenience this issue caused and I can tell you that everyone @ OWN was all over the issue immediately both trying to fix it right away and help our partners and users. When we fixed it we didn’t just move on – we decided to immediately implement features that are going to be valuable to our partners right away.

This is the level of commitment my entire team has to our partner and client base. I want you to know that I truly appreciate your business and if you like this feature you owe a bit of gratitude to the team at Readycrest Ltd: Paul Bonathan, Chris Walton and Justin Sands spent a lot of time past the the quitting hours to help us test and deploy this.

Have a wonderful day!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

ExchangeDefender Web Security Launch

Dear Partners,

Please join me this Thursday (January 7th @ 3 PM EST) for a live webcast covering the launch of ExchangeDefender Web Security Suite. The webcast will be live and you’re welcome to dial in and post questions. If you cannot make it, recording will be available for download later on Thursday.

What’s the topic? It’s become evident that threats are migrating from the email and SPAM to the web where few users are adequately protected. Even worse, most users have little or no protection outside of their corporate offices while most users browse the web with older and unpatched browsers that make easy targets. As more of our applications and communications move to the web, ExchangeDefender is launching the following products this Thursday:

ExchangeDefender Web Filtering – Agent based web filtering solution is designed for Windows PC’s and operates as a service that blocks URL requests at the TCP level. This way we can intercept dangerous traffic even if it is sent through anonymizer proxy or a port other than 80/443. Because each agent is user authenticated, each ExchangeDefender can have their own block policy that is refreshed every hour with either your custom URL lists or over 80 categories of web sites sorted by content.

ExchangeDefender Web Sharing – The web sharing and collaboration needs have grown beyond the feature offerings of FTP and ExchangeDefender is delivering a platform for file sharing and distribution. ExchangeDefender Web Filtering allows users to upload content to their private site, email links, be notified when downloads happen, automatically destroy files after a certain amount of time and more.

ExchangeDefender LDAP Integration – For larger enterprises, user management is a pain. With ExchangeDefender LDAP integration, our user list is in complete sync with your Active Directory or any other LDAP user database. Our agent monitors any account modifications, additions and deletions and replicates them to the ExchangeDefender network.

We will continue to release new components of ExchangeDefender throughout January and February because the scope of our platform is immense – we want to explore and collect feedback on each and every piece and make sure our partner base is educated.

We are holding partner Lunch & Learn events where either I or one of my senior engineers will walk your staff through our product and discuss any integration ideas or best practices. If you’re interested, let me know.

So tune in: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/991505921

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

ExchangeDefender 5 UI Changes Webcast Available

Just a brief note to bring you up to date with the ExchangeDefender 5 launch and all the wonderful stuff that is coming with it. If you didn’t get a chance to join me during one of the three webcasts last week, don’t worry, you can download it now and watch it at your own pace:

Download ExchangeDefender 5 UI Webcast

Please watch the video in full screen, on my Windows 7 system it started with a black screen and I could not see the presentation without resizing.

The Progress So Far

Things are going remarkably well with the new release and the few issues that we have faced so far have been addressed very quickly. We have all hands on ExchangeDefender at the moment and are doing all we can to make the product rock solid and inform everyone of the changes and get you to take what I feel is once in a lifetime sale you will see in ExchangeDefender. ExchangeDefender 5 is a radical change in our business model and really the first in our industry, so we want to thank those of you that have helped us build it. The promotion runs through March 1st or first 250,000 mailboxes, whichever comes first.

So far so good! Thank you for your business and keep those emails coming, I’m really happy to read the market response about ExchangeDefender 5!

ExchangeDefender 5 Released – Update Policy

Thank you all for helping us with ExchangeDefender 5 – it is now up and running and the new UI’s are drawing a lot of attention. So far everything is moving well but I wanted to share the official policy when it comes to addressing bugs and issues.

Through Jan 1st, 2010 we will be making daily updates to the portal to patch any bugs and optimize the site as much as we can. I’d like to ask for your patience and documentation of anything that seems out of place, we are working on the product constantly for the next few weeks.

You will be receiving an update on every new domain added and we will manually check each new account creation, deletion and modification to make sure everything is operating flawlessly.

As mentioned on the webcast, ExchangeDefender 5 is a fully modular system and we do not anticipate releasing another point release in the future. Updates, enhancements and optimizations along with new features will be released on a monthly and quarterly basis from now on.

Again, thank you for your patience and your business – we hope you enjoy ExchangeDefender 5!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE, CEO Own Web Now Corp

P.S. Webcasts will be released this week.

ExchangeDefender 5.. So Far

Last week I got the pleasure of finally unloading the business pitch about ExchangeDefender 5 and all the features we’ve built for this new business model.

If you missed the webcast, you can download it here.

If you have any questions about what we’re up to or how it stacks up with what you’re currently using – please take the compete challenge.

Make no mistake, there is no comparison to the feature set, price or organization that stands behind the solution. Simply, none. Take a look at the PDF and find another SAS 70 Type II audited company that will deliver all that for 75 cents / mailbox and you’ll be right back here. We worked very hard to build this offering and make our partners winners in 2010. We’ve made serious investments and addressed some of the “you’ll never see that happen” concerns and comments we’ve gotten over the years.

So let’s talk about some less-than-glamorous changes in ExchangeDefender 5:

SMTP tempfail

Our new SMTP implementation has reduced the inbound mail flow by 91%. It went live with ExchangeDefender 5 backend which is the reason why you have so little SPAM to deal with or review all of a sudden.

“I have to admit that I never looked at the old reports because they had nothing but junk. I love the new short list and it still hasn’t caught a single piece of real mail. Nice combination!”

What does this mean for you? Well, less SPAM to review. Less likelyhood that the user will blindly whitelist a forged address and let a ton of SPAM in. Less storage on the server. More attentive users. Less SPAM or accidental whitelist slippage. Overall, less nightmares.

Want more? ExchangeDefender will give you an option (for free) to queue up to 1 month of SPAM on our servers. This way, if you take a 3 week vacation, you can still access the SPAM that got trapped while you’re out. Nobody else does this.

Support Tiering

Once upon a time, I answered the phone. Every time.

That’s because I was the only one working at Own Web Now Corp.

Grow by leaps and bounds and you get a logistical nightmare of providing expert support, knowledge and customer service around the clock. At the end of the day, we are paid for our performance and reliability (SLA) – not for the customer service and brownie points. The new support escalation process has been fantastic, we got a ton of great comments and we’re still working out all the details as well.

But don’t take my word for it, here is the impression our partners get:

“I called in to Travis today to ask about the intended cutover process (was it worth me getting something rolling now before the upgrade or should I wait?)  I have to tell you that might have been the (good) Customer Service example of the month (although his competition at Intuit yesterday left him plenty of room).  He answered all the questions directly and more importantly I was impressed with what he did with the ones he COULDN’T answer.  He excused himself momentarily as he wrote them down on the whiteboard to insure he asked (whomever) before he got back to me.  He confirmed my email address and phone number and then proceeded to tell me what he was going to do and by when.  (And he did all of that in an accent I could understand!)

If you have an employee of the <timeframe> – I nominate Travis.  Not for going above and beyond.  Not for being outstanding.  Just for doing his job well and leaving this individual with a perception of having been well taken care of.  He didn’t fix all my sh*t but he did his job so well, I didn’t care.  That’s all we ask for with customer f*ckig service.” 

We don’t consider our support a cost center – we consider it to be a key feature in our service. Our new escalation let’s everyone document the case, the smartest and right person to solve the problem and the nicest and most market aware person to call you back when you have a true problem.

The Backend

ExchangeDefender 5 has been live on the backend and running flawlessly for a while now. In addition to reducing the load, reducing the SPAM counts and making the overall system more effective we have noticed the following changes:

1. Lowest whitelist / blacklist activity of the year (fewer false whitelists of forged addresses)
2. Faster login and message search due to database compression
3. Faster message delivery due to the elimination of deliver/deliver across different SPAM confidence levels that got misused.
4. No complaints about delays.
5. No complaints about the whitelists with the new MagicKey infrastructure.

We have made the system more efficient, less burdensome and managing SPAM has become an afterthought. Now we turn to making profits with everything else ExchangeDefender brings you free of charge.

Next Steps

Our new User, Domain Administrator and Service Provider UI launches this week (on December 8th) and if you’re technical you need to be there. I will be holding three live webinars and launching ExchangeDefender 5 in the final one, at 10 PM. Here are the webinars, the first two have just a few seats left:

Tuesday, December 8th, 7 AM – 8 AM EST

Tuesday, December 8th, 3 PM – 4 PM EST

Tuesday, December 8th, 10 PM – 11 PM EST

So to review:

If you missed the first webcast, download it from here and find out the business proposition. If you are currently not on ExchangeDefender, you seriously need to figure out what you’re missing. Finally, register for the 3 webcasts due next week to showcase the new UI launch. So far, things are going great!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

P.S. One of my competitors in this space that I have a pretty good relationship with told me today that I’m killing him and when the torture will be over. Which brings me to the funny conversation I had in the parking lot earlier tonight as we were leaving the office and I tried to fill in a few holes in the details. My coworkers response: “Wow. We are going to be doing all that?” – yep, folks, it’s on.